Last chance saloon

Sunday 13 May 2001 11.32 EDT
First published on Sunday 13 May 2001 11.32 EDT

I was almost out of petrol and stuck in a traffic jam on the road of death (M25) with no services in sight unless I took the M4 and hacked down to Heston. But that must be at least 20 miles away and I knew I wouldn't make it.

I could picture myself soon stranded on a barren hard shoulder and knew I'd need a drink but also that I wouldn't have one. With that, the image of the hard shoulder dissolved into one of the boxer Mitchell 'Blood' Green, the true-life inspiration for the film The Warriors who, once when he was arrested by New York police, was found to have both a cocktail cabinet and a television mounted on his dashboard, even though he was utterly impoverished. Class.

While I made it off the road of death, my trusty hatchback conked out about 600 yards from Heston. Actually the hard shoulder wasn't as bad as I'd imagined and for a minute I sat there smoking in a mood of fake calmness, keeping the terror at bay and watching the English crawl past in their clean cars thinking, how do they do it? Where do they get their money from?

Is it H.P. after all? Must be, mustn't it...?

I saw one young family go past, the adults apparently loaded but surly and glum, and the sweet, innocent children perched among Asda bags laden to the brim, no doubt already ensnared by their parents into talking in the new Australasian way of ending their sentences with an upward lilt.

I mean I've been into those giant Asdas - normally to purchase a couple of bottles of own-label Cotes de Rhone (£2.79, 20 points) - and stood being hated among the football-shirted, shaven aggressors waving gold cards about and, well, you have to ask, don't you?

One of those new thin fascistic speed cameras was looking beadily down on me and I knew it was only a matter of minutes before I was rumbled and some sort of motorway security or, worse, the rozzers themselves would be on the scene. For reasons I can't go into I couldn't afford that and realised I'd have to leg it.

Briefly I debated what I should take with me since I keep half my possessions in the back of the hatchback, and decided on the bright green flokati rug from Delphi rather than the table lamp, because although I've written much of my best work in the shade of that lamp, you'd look silly carrying it on foot into the Heathrowian wastes.

However, just as I was preparing to roll up the flokati I decided to give the ignition one more go and, amazingly, it worked. I acknowledged that among all those passing English that I had dissed must have been the goddess Athena in one of her guises, and me and the hatchback limped into Heston where a very nice Asian lad (non-white-English-culture theory) let me put £1.80 in even though it was under the two-litre minimum.

I felt like a member of the human race again walking back to that car and also, keenly, that I deserved to be remunerated for all the trauma I had suffered. I know everyone else seems to think like that now but my reasons were different. I would fight in wars.

Although I had resolved that morning to give up the poncing lark, by now it was several hours past the midday cocktail hour so I drove to north-west London and ponced a whopping £200 off a TV producer I know called Roy, a lovely bloke. While we were by the cashpoint he said that the last time he'd been there a van had drawn up and a man had offered him two £1,000 speakers for a hundred quid of 'cashpoint money'.

Must be some new black-market term. Roy had bought them as well. And they'd worked.

'I feel bad about it, though,' Roy said, in all seriousness as we drove away. 'I think I should probably have taken them to a charity shop rather than set them up.'

I reassured him that I had done far worse things and, having dropped Roy off, drove off in the hatchback down the North Circular. The petrol light was on again, in fact it had never gone off, but it was nothing.

I broke into a flat in Kew owned by my adoptive parents, who live abroad, and rang them to tell them I had done so. They weren't happy about it and would have preferred me to leave, but admitted there was nothing they could do about it until June, which was true enough. The anticipation of my first drink was delicious and also virtually unprecedented at that advanced time of day, as was the feeling of having some proper money in my pocket - even though it was Roy's - and a nice place to stay.

I rang my girl for the first time in ages - because I knew I could afford her exquisite tastes for a change - and, having arranged to meet at a riverside pub, walked over Kew Bridge with a spring in my step.

Halfway over, a rather soiled but amiable-looking bloke, just my type in fact, leapt out of his car and asked me for an autograph. I said, are you sure? But he said he was, and that I was only the third person he'd asked one from. The first two were Mr Chips (?) and Jah Wobble.

I signed his crumpled copy of the racing newspaper, Weekender, and, walking on, recognised the hateful feeling of my face blushing. But I got over it quickly, reached the pub, met my beaut girl and had a lovely evening, stopping off at Thresher on the way back for a couple of up-market bottles.

Lying there later on with one of them beside me on my bedside table I thought I could hear the early birdsong from Kew Gardens. I brushed my girl's hair away from her eyes, took a swig and suddenly all my problems seemed somehow soluble, particularly if I could find a way to sell the flat.

Famous drinkers: Judy Garland

From the age of two Judy Garland, then Frances Ethel Gumm, was forced by a pushy mother to earn her living in dreamland. Hollywood noticed Judy's developed vocals at the age of 13 and she was signed to MGM. In her time at the studio she completed 43 films and was fired on seven occasions. Garland's nights and days were controlled by her drug intakes, a bottle of vodka or Blue Nun, an inexpensive sweet German wine, would always be within reach to glug down her pills. She drank steadily from the 1940s, when she was married to film director Vincent Minelli, their daughter Liza being the only child who carried her own stomach pump to the studio in case her mother needed assistance.

By her fourth marriage Judy found a place with Hollywood's biggest drinkers including Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin. During the shooting of A Star is Born, Garland replaced the water in her thermos with vodka and grapefruit juice and when the film premiered, she instructed the dress designers to make her an extra large muff, big enough to conceal a vodka bottle. In 1969 she died of a failing liver and a drug overdose.